text:
Dir: Johnnie To. Hong Kong-China. 2012. 105mins
Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To's first action film to be shot in mainland China is gritty, uncompromising and hugely exhilarating. It feels like a step forward for a director whose more recent bullet ballets – in particular Sparrow (2008) and Vengeance (2009) – had started to feel increasingly stylised. There's nothing mannered about the anti-trafficking police operation charted in Drug War (Duzhan): perhaps mindful of his need to prove to the censors that he's taking narcotics seriously, To spends less time choreographing conflict and more charting, at a breakneck pace, the messiness of a nasty, vicious war.
The dirty realism is amplified by To's use of natural light and anyway-they-fall camera angles.
It's proof of the maturity of the Chinese production sector that it has bankrolled a film that comes on like The French Connection meets The Wire, and features several scenes of in-your-face (and in-their-noses) drug use.
Of course, mainland audiences may not be given the benefit of a domestic release, but elsewhere this feisty, pugnacious number will positively benefit from its pioneering location, among international cineastes curious to see the mean streets of the New China. To followers and Asian genre fans should embrace the film warmly, and auxiliary prospects look upbeat. The film was shoehorned into the Rome film festival at the last minute.
To's determination not to glamourise his subject is clear from the get-go, when after a stake-out at a motorway toll booth that nets a haul of drug mules, we're shown, in grubby detail, the painful excretion and washing of the drug-packed ovules these peasant pawns have swallowed. In the same hospital, Timmy (Koo, dubbed into Mandarin) is being kept under police watch while being treated for skin lesions caused by an explosion at the drug factory he operates. Re-apprehended after an escape attempt, a convalescent Timmy offers to help police narcotics unit captain Zhang (Honglei) in return for commutation of his death penalty (which is automatically handed out to large-scale drug producers and traffickers in China) to life imprisonment.
So begins a wary partnership between the tough yet circumspect old police officer and Louis Koo's entrepreneurial young drug lieutenant, who helps to set up a meeting with his boss Brother HaHa (Ping), named after his trademark laugh. The jeopardy factor is nicely upped when, in order to get to the higher echelons of the drug supply and distribution chain, Zhang starts to impersonate Haha, supported by serious young policewoman Yang Xiaobei (Yi) in the role of the drug baron's flouncy floozy wife. Helped by two out of town cops who have been trailing a lorry full of drug factory chemicals, Zhang's team begin to home in on shadowy Uncle Bill (Zhenqi), who may or not be the regional drug world's Mr Big.
Surveillance operations, stake-outs and undercover infiltrations succeed each other at breathless speed, taking us from luxe hotels to a drug factory presided over by two deaf-mute brothers to new-rich Chinese nightclubs with glam cabaret floorshows. The film is set in and around Tianjen, Beijing's rapidly growing seaport, which is presented here as a place of savage, unregulated modernity. A scene in which Zhang, posing as Brother HaHa, orders the whole Tianjen fishing fleet out to sea to impress Uncle Bill, is rich with symbolic resonance, as we see dozens of merry Peoples' Republic pennants flapping in the wind as the boats set sail, apparently at the beck and call of a sleazy drug baron.
Not since PTU (2003) and Breaking News (2004) has To really got under the skin of a working police unit to this extent. There's not much psychological shading, to be sure, but little observations like the dash of the two out of town cops to urinate by the side of the road when they're finally given time off by superior officer Zhang wryly nail the trials of the job, and the team exudes loyal esprit de corps without the need for heavy buddy-love dialogue.
It's this understated solidarity, and the higher stakes of crime and its prevention in mainland China, that make the shootouts (especially the final school bus sequence) feel a lot more bruisingly than the urban gun dance of Sparrow or Exiled. The dirty realism is amplified by To's use of natural light and anyway-they-fall camera angles: with almost a TV look at times, Drug War does its best to avoid the conventional noirish atmosphere and Hong Kong gangster aesthetic that To himself helped to define.
Production companies: Beijing Hairun Pictures Co Ltd, Huaxia Film Distribution Co Ltd, CCTV 6 Movie Channel
International sales: Media Asia Group Holdings Ltd, www.mediaasia.com
Producers: Johnnie To, Wai Ka Fai
Executive producers: Liu Yanming, Gu Guoqing, Yan Xiaoming
Screenplay: Wai Ka Fai, Yau Nai Hoi, Ryker Chan, Yu Xi
Cinematography: Cheng Siu Keung
Editor: Allen Leung
Production designer: Jackson Ha
Music: Xavier Jamaux
Main cast: Sun Honglei, Louis Koo, Huang Yi, Gao Yunxiang, Wallace Chung, Li Guangije, Hao Ping, Gan Tingting, Chang Taishen, Li Zhenqi, Guo Tao, Li Jing


text:
Case study
Sharmila Oli
Sharmila Oli is 30 years old, and lives in a remote village in Surkhet District, Nepal with her daughter (11 years old) and two sons (8 and 5 years old). Her husband, Durga Bahadur Dangi (31 years old), works as a migrant labourer in Qatar. Her in-laws live opposite them in a separate household. All of her children attend school. Sharmila herself is educated to Secondary level. Sharmila works on her land and produces and sells seeds through the Pavitra Seed Cooperative under Oxfam's Enterprise Development Programme.
Sharmila has always worked on her land, located 10–15-minutes' walk away, and she mainly produces maize, wheat and paddy. Depending on the season she will work up to eight hours on the land each day. Nine years ago she became a member of the Pavitra Seed Cooperative and began seed production for greater profits. She single-handedly works on the farm as Durga Bahadur migrates out of the country for work:
It is difficult… I have to irrigate the land by myself which is difficult, plantation is equally difficult, if my husband and I could work together, and if he did not have to go out it would have been easier but he has to go [abroad] to earn enough money.
Sharmila also has to hire paid labour if she falls ill and is unable to work on the farm.
The money that Sharmila earns helps to pay for her children's education and to buy rations for the household: 'I don't earn much but the money from seed production is enough to feed ourselves, to educate my children and meet other household expenses.' She feels that she could generate higher profits if there were better irrigation facilities, although things are better than they used to be:
We don't have enough water here and our farm is small as well, but unlike before, we have enough wheat and maize to feed ourselves now. I have enough money to buy my children's clothes and pay their school fee.
Sharmila does most of the unpaid care and other work for the household and its livestock, including cutting grass for fodder, fetching firewood, fetching water, cooking, and cleaning the house, besides taking care of her children. She finds that chopping firewood, going to the mill, and fetching water during the summer take up a lot of her time and energy. Her eldest daughter, Deepa, helps her a lot with both care and unpaid work in the house. Deepa regularly helps with cooking, looking after their buffalo and cleaning the animal shed, sweeping the house, washing the utensils and caring for her siblings. On Saturdays, Deepa also helps her mother to fetch firewood, which she finds most tedious and difficult: 'I hurt myself often when I chop firewood.' The eldest son helps with caring for the cattle and sometimes helps with 'cutting the firewood', while the youngest son assists his siblings in caring for the animals in the house. All of the children are involved with fetching water for consumption and for irrigating the field. Sharmila's mother-in-law takes care of the children if Sharmila has gone far for paid or unpaid work and returns late at night. When Durga Bahadur is at home, he will help with the cooking if Sharmila is away for paid work or has gone to collect firewood. He also helps with ploughing on the farm when he is home. Sharmila does not receive any additional support from members of the community.
Sharmila finds it difficult to balance both paid work and care work during peak agricultural time (four months in duration). She is unable to carry out certain unpaid tasks during that time:
I am unable to clean the children, my house and also the shed where my cattle are kept… I am unable to make food for them [her children] when they return from school and then they complain about it as they are all hungry. That is a problem.
She tries to do everything by herself, 'digging, sowing seeds, irrigating the land, harvesting, etc.', as otherwise she would have to hire outside paid labour. This drudgery leads to many physical ailments such as pain in her limbs and catching colds during irrigation. She seldom gets time to rest and is unable to recall a specific time that she has for resting.
Furthermore, Sharmila's intensive paid work leads to her daughter being burdened with all types of care and unpaid work; Deepa complains of time constraints on her education due to this burden. She says:
My mother tells me to return early in the evening so that I finish all the work… She tells me to skip playing and return home [and] I get time to study only after I finish all my work [at home].
Sharmila finds it cumbersome when she has to attend cooperative meetings: 'I have to wake up an hour earlier than usual and finish all the work… I cut the grass in the evening after I come back from the meeting.' She feels that instead of having monthly meetings, they could take place once every three months: 'it would help save both time and money.' She also wishes the cooperative members could be provided with bigger seed-sorting machines: 'if there are facilities, like the machines would be very helpful and save my time during the cultivating period.'
Sharmila feels her burdens would be less if she had more income as she could take out fewer loans. She wishes an organisation would do something about the irrigation system in the village: 'we take turns so some [people] have fallow land and some [farms] are planted.' More irrigation would help her to earn more profit from her farm.
The transportation facility provided by the cooperative to carry her seeds has lessened Sharmila's burden to quite an extent. Similarly, she wishes the cooperative would provide members with useful information and training based on local contexts: 'the organisation should send people to train us on the suitable grasses for this area... type of grasses that would be suitable in a place like this where there is shortage of water.'
She also thinks that the Village Development Committee (VDC) should be more proactive in meeting the women's demands. She shares that the loan provided by the VDC for building a community hall for women in the village was insufficient: 'the money that we received from them for building the house was too less so we invested in loan with the plan to building a house after we earn more from it.'
A combination of all these would help Sharmila balance her paid work with her care work in a way that she is able to earn a decent living without worrying about her care responsibilities (especially for her children) and without her feeling overstretched/overburdened. This would be a true picture of a 'double boon' situation for Sharmila.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Revolut <18
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text:
Uninterrupted AC power (UPS function)
In the event of a grid failure, or when shore or generator power is disconnected, the inverter within the Multi is automatically activated and takes over the supply to the connected loads. This happens so fast (less than 20 milliseconds) that computers and other electronic equipment will continue to operate without disruption.
Remote Monitoring and Control
Monitor and control your MultiPlus and system or systems' locally (LAN) or remotely via the internet from anywhere in the world, using the free VRM app and free VRM portal website. Access can be from a phone, tablet, laptop or PC for multiple operating systems. There is no end to the level of control, via the required Color Control GX or Venus GX, from adjusting your MultiPlus to setting a Geofence for hire vehicles and more...
VE Configure 3 basic | Victron Energy
Weight (kg) | 10 |
Output power (V) | 230 |
Input voltage (V) | 12 |
Height (mm) | 375 |
Width (mm) | 214 |
Depth (mm) | 110 |
Shape of output voltage | Pure sinus |
Min. operating temperature (°C) | -20 |
Max. operating temperature (°C) | 65 |


text:
Dear OGIB Reader,
The cheapest and most profitable oil North America has ever seen is now "flooding" into the market, as producers once again use old technology to create a wave of new profits.
Producers are using "waterfloods"—pushing water into underground formations to flush a large amount of oil out to nearby producing wells—to increase production and profits. It's the next big money-making phase of the Shale Revolution.
Waterflooding has been around for 70 years or more, but the Big Question over the last five years has been—can you do it effectively with tight oil?
The answer is a Big Yes, and waterflood potential has become so important that institutional investors now see them as major share price catalysts for junior producers—and track them closely.
Waterfloods start 1-2 years after drilling the well, in a time window producers call "secondary recovery." (Drilling is primary recovery.) Waterfloods are cheap to try and cheap to run (with most operations costing just $5-10 per barrel!), and now the industry is seeing that they are sometimes doubling reserves from a well.
"Secondary recovery is where you really make all your money in this industry," says Dan Toews, VP Finance and CFO of Pinecrest Energy (PRY-TSX.V).
Pinecrest is very vocal about their waterflood potential. They say they can double the amount of oil they recover (called the Recovery Factor, or RF) from a well—at less than $15/barrel—half the price of primary recovery costs, which are over $30/barrel.
"Everyone is trying to find a new resource play," says Toews. "First you find a resource, and then you drill it like crazy. But the second stage is to go in for your secondary recovery, through waterflooding of some kind if possible."
To date, Pinecrest isn't yet flowing even one barrel of waterflooded oil—so their powerpoint slide is just projections. Toews and his team expect to be waterflooding all of their operations by the end of this quarter. But analysts are already seeing the waterfloods as a share price catalyst.
"Just about every investor and institution we talk to wants to know the status with our waterfloods," says Toews. "The buyside (fund managers= buyside, brokerage firms=sell side—ed.) is very savvy on waterfloods. Once we apply the method, this is what has the potential to shoot up our share prices."
Realistically, the effects can be seen within 2-3 months, but it's best to give them a year—or more—of operations before judging their impact. Waterfloods can last up to 20 years or more.
Another Canadian oil junior, Raging River Exploration (RRX-TSX), also explains the waterflood potential in their powerpoint. They expect to be swimming in 1 million EXTRA recoverable barrels of oil per square mile, courtesy of waterfloods—at an even cheaper cost of $5-10 barrel, vs $30 barrel for the first 600,000 barrels.
Raging River is developing the Viking formation in SW Saskatchewan—a large, tight oil play that since the 1950s has had an improved outlook from 2 billion barrels of oil to an estimated 6 billion barrels of oil in place, all thanks to horizontal drilling.
Raging River expects waterflooding to increase its RF from 8% from primary recovery methods (drilling vertical and horizontal wells) using 16 wells/section, to 16-20%. The simple math says that will increase the number of barrels recovered from 480 million at 8% to 1.25 billion at 20% RF.
If Raging River—or any producer—can show a steady RF for over a year, I would suggest to investors those barrels will be worth $10-$15 each—creating huge value to shareholders on a buyout.
Some Viking waterfloods have even seen results as high as 30% RF.
"A small change of recovery over a large oil field is significant and adds a tremendous amount of value," says Scott Saxberg, President and CEO of Crescent Point Energy (CPG – TSX), arguably seen as the industry leader in the waterflooding revival.
"A lot of these unconventional plays (tight oil) are in high decline. By implementing waterfloods, we can lower the declines in the field, and increase reserves. There's huge value to that."
Crescent Point started waterflooding its properties five years ago when multi-stage fracking (MSF) was new on the scene. Now they have five years of knowledge that the method works, and that they can use it across all of their fields.
"We recognized right away to implement a strategy to increase the recovery factor on a multi billion barrel pool," says Saxberg. "If you change even 1%, that ends up being huge."
"Waterflooding is the next step past in-fill drilling (ie. drilling more holes in less space to increase ultimate recovery). It takes a lot of time to accrue knowledge and data on how to properly implement it. The sooner you start, the better data you have."
According to Saxberg, waterflooding is more than just a cheap way to float balance sheets.
Over the course of Crescent Point's five-year waterflooding program, they've developed hundreds of different combinations of waterflooding techniques coupled with fracking techniques, well spacing and plenty of other factors.
"Water flooding is basic, in that you pump water into the ground," says Saxberg. "So to enhance that, you have to look at what type of patterns are in your reservoir. Now these are unconventional tight reservoirs, so the question was, can they actually be water flooded?"
Again, the Big Answer is Yes, and management teams are now using the promise of waterfloods as a cheap way to float their balance sheets earlier in a resource play. But Saxberg says waterfloods are truly more long-term value.
"They are a long term day-after-day technical grind and process. So it's not the same as drilling a well and seeing 100bbls/day. It's a lot of ups and downs and a lot of long term view."
There's only one negative here that I see—how will all that cheap oil affect North American pricing, when the continent is already swimming in the stuff?
In the short term, the pro-forma economics of waterfloods are making a splash with both management teams and the market.
But medium term and beyond, it will create a quandary for juniors—the easy money comes after huge capital spending.


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text:
You can view any 3D model in Virtual Reality using a VR headset (such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift) and a compatible browser.
Setup Instructions
Google Chrome is currently the most reliable browser to use for VR in most circumstances. These instructions are for Chrome on Windows 10.
- Install Steam and SteamVR
- In Chrome/Chromium, go to chrome://flags and set these flags to these values:
- WebXR Device API: Enabled
- Force WebXR Runtime: SteamVR (OpenVR)
Viewing Instructions
- Turn on your device
- HTC Vive: Turn on SteamVR
- Oculus Rift: Allow external apps
- Start VR Mode on any Sketchfab model page.
The web browser you need to use to view models in VR depends on the headset you're using.
Browsers marked by an asterisk (*) should work, but may be less reliable.
Device | Browser(s) |
Oculus Rift |
Chrome, Firefox* |
HTC Vive |
Chrome, Firefox* |
Windows Mixed Reality |
Chrome, Firefox* |
Oculus Quest | Oculus Browser |
Windows Mixed Reality | Edge |
While Sketchfab may be accessible in other VR-based devices and apps, not all are properly maintained and compatible. For example, Google Cardboard is no longer maintained and supported for Sketchfab viewer use.
Adjusting resolution
Sketchfab reduces resolution to ensure a frame rate for a good VR experience. If you want to bypass this reduction, particularly in Oculus Quest, you can use these custom parameters at the end of your model's URL:
- 1.5 medium (default)
- 2.5 high
- 3.5 very high


text:
XP is just a number | |
PerlMonks |
On finding the Perl Wisdomby Aristotle (Chancellor) |
on Jan 12, 2002 at 21:57 UTC ( [id://138297] : monkdiscuss . print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
You know, I find myself spending increasingly more time in Meditations these days, and I've also "discovered" the more static sections like Snippets - at the expense of time spent in SoPW, which I used to visit almost exclusively. Somehow, I find, SoPW has become boring and repetitive, at least to me. Sure I still check it all the time, and I try to contribute my share - but it's more like payback, like "doing my share" for being able to participate in the "actually interesting" parts of the site. I was wondering - is it just me? Have I been part of PerlMonks for long enough that I've seen the common answers now that just seemed new when I first got in here? Or has SoPW actually gotten more repetitive? Originally I wrote the above on the Chatterbox. After the ensuing discussion which focussed on Super Search I decided to take a transcript here (with express permission! - before anyone cries foul). This is a heavily edited version with a lot of irrelevant material removed - but none of the remaining chat has been altered. <Aristotle> you know, I find myself spending increasingly more time in Meditations these days, and I've also "discovered" the more static sections like Snippets - at the expense of time spent in SoPW, which I used to visit almost exclusively <Aristotle> somehow SoPW has become boring, and repetitive, to me. sure, I still check it all the time, and try to contribute my share. but it's more like payback work, "doing my share", for being able to participate in the "actually interesting" parts of the site <Petruchio> I think that as you become more experienced, you learn to figure things out for yourself. I always have plenty of questions... but few that I don't think I can figure out with sufficient effort. So I tend not to ask. I suspect many people are like this <Petruchio> Except, of course, those who haven't figured out how to figure things out yet. And they usually have the same problems over and over. <jptxs> maybe we should put in an ask jeeves like question search, make it a mandatory first step in posting for monk or below levels... <Aristotle> what I was wondering is, it is it just me? maybe I have been part of PerlMonks for long enough that I saw a lot of common answers that seemed new when I first got in here, but are no longer? or has SoPW actually gotten more repetitive? <Petruchio> Eh... I don't know about putting constraints on asking questions. I think we just need to recognize that some repetition is inevitable, and leave the answering to the patient. And improve our resources, so that it's easier for people to find answers. <Petruchio> It can be hard to find things in the Monastery. And you've got the same problem as you have in coding itself. Searching for answers is also a learned skill. <jptxs> i don't mean a constraint really, just another step. that way they at least see search results based on their problem. they can still go ahead and post it if they can't figure out howto apply them.... <Petruchio> Once you've learned the layout of the place, it's not bad, of course. But that takes a bit. <Petruchio> Super Search is still anything but an obvious feature. <Petruchio> In fact, it's obscured by the regular search box. People will not ask how to search the site when there's a search box at top left. And they won't find what they're looking for in that search box. So they'll ask, instead. <jptxs> true. that's why I would think putting it's functionality in a more obvious place directly related to question asking would be helpful, no? <Petruchio> Sure... I'm all for plastering links to Super Search all over the site. :-) <dthacker> I'd like to see Super Search in a more prominent location, as well as categorized Q&A. My personal experience is that 80% of my questions have been answered in one of those two places <Aristotle> do I have permission to explicitly quote you guys if I make this a post in PM Discussion? <jptxs> i don't mean links to it all over the site (incase that was sarcasm I detect there), I literally mean using it's power in the question posting process to maybe actually help people more quickly <jptxs> repeat questions bore people. so they don't get answered quickly, even if they're well formed and polite <jptxs> having the search could help not only we the bored but the posters of the boring as well.... <Petruchio> You have mine. One thing I would recommend about suggesting changes to the site: consider the tone you take. Changing things is work... someone else's work. So reques politely. Not that you weren't going to anyway. It's just worth mentioning. <dthacker> you have my permission to quote <jptxs> very true, wise Petruchio. many have made "requests" with the tone of demands or which sound like, "Hey stupid, didn't you see *this* was the way to do these things?" <Petruchio> And I do mean it when I say, 'plaster it all over the site'. In particular, there's room on the bar at the top of the page, between 'Search' and 'Perl Monks'. I think that's be a lovely place to put 'Super Search' <Aristotle> thanks guys - Petruchio, I am aware of that. I adminster a site with a largish messageboard (some 500 active users, I estimate), and I know what it means to ask for features <jptxs> could be. I'd be afraid of over-running the db, though. super search is pretty raw.... <jptxs> although i guess doing a SS every time you had a question being posted wouldn't be much better... <Petruchio> Either we want people to use Super Search, or we don't. I don't see an alternative. If we don't, it means putting up with more redundant questions. <Aristotle> jptxs, one idea might be to have a "super search" _box_, not link, there, which defaults to a relatively restricted set of rules, like only searches in SoPW+Q&A, and maybe some more constrains <jptxs> Aristotle, that wouldn't make the SQL all that better. especially since those are the largest most populated sections by far... <Aristotle> well I do agree with Petruchio that we either want or don't want people to use SS So if it was possible to conveniently do a Super Search from the top of the screen, possibly with a sensible set of common constraints, novices might more often find answers before posting to get them. Of course, I realize, every feature requires work - but I believe this one would require hardly if anything more than putting another <form> in the main template.
Back to
Perl Monks Discussion


text:
- Home
- Government
- Departments
- Fire Marshal's Office
- Fire & Life Safety Inspection
- Scheduling an Inspection
Scheduling an Inspection
Inspection Requirements
If an inspection is required because of the construction process, or because a business is licensed by an agency that requires an inspection, please prepare by walking through the space and correcting any obvious problems prior to the inspection date. The inspection then will go more quickly and be much more likely to pass.
If the inspector feels that the property was not prepared for the inspection, or no one was there to meet him or her, DPFMO may charge a re-inspection fee of $50 that must be paid in person at the Deer Park Fire Marshal's Office prior to rescheduling. The same fee also can be applied if the customer calls to cancel an inspection any time after noon on the day prior to the scheduled inspection. These fees have made it possible to maintain a turnaround time of 1 to 5 days for scheduling an inspection by cutting down on the number of failed inspections and cancelled inspections.
To ensure and maintain compliance with Life Safety Codes, Fire Prevention Codes and State Standards for the safety and welfare of all employees, residents, visitors, and emergency responders in the City of Deer Park, all businesses are required to have an annual inspection and receive a Life Safety Operating Permit.
The codes and standards are applied equally and with consistency to all applicable occupancies.
Inspections Process
The assigned Fire Inspector goes to an existing business facility and conducts a thorough inspection of the facility. Any violations found are recorded on a Fire Inspection Report along with the applicable codes and the required corrective action needed to come into compliance. The Fire Inspector will discuss the report in detail with the occupant to assure that the information is clearly understood.
The Fire Inspector will then return in thirty days for a re-inspection of the noted violations. If the violations have been corrected, the Fire Inspector will note compliance and the occupant will be given a clear inspection notice. However, failure to correct the violations will result in the issuance of a Final Notice of Violation, and the case will be forwarded to the Fire Marshal until the facility becomes compliant.
Inspectors are responsible for inspecting all existing commercial and multi-family occupancies within the County's jurisdiction on an annual basis. Only single and double family residences are exempt. include, but are not limited to:
- Nursing homes and assisted living facilities
- Schools, daycare facilities and other recreational or educational centers
- Apartment condominium buildings
- Industrial and manufacturing facilities
- Retail stores, business offices, dining and entertainment establishments
Request and Inspection
To schedule a fire inspection, call 281-478-7291 between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. or email the fire marshal.


text:
27 January 2012
Flight 8 Is On Diaspora
Flight 8's internet presence consisted of just a website only for a number of years. Initially run by Flight Captain Mike Shaw, then current webmaster Adam Hunt took it over. On 26 August 2007 the old website was replaced by a new one written in XHTML to make it web standards compliant and also make it load and work better.
Then on 12 August 2007 Mike Shaw launched this blog, with the urgent question "Does the Canadian Owners and Pilot's Association Flight 8 need a blog?". With 101 posts to date (not counting this one) it seems to be fulfilling its purpose and occasionally draws debate on contentious issues.
On 25 January 2012 Mike Shaw moved the flight onto Twitter. Not one to be outdone for social media, Adam Hunt opened a Diaspora account for the Flight on 27 January 2012.
Since most people have never heard of Diaspora, some explanation is in order. Diaspora is a social media network that was created by four students attending New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer. Like a lot of people they had serious issues with Facebook and the fact that it is a private company that owns the rights to everything you write or upload and sells your data to advertisers, tracks you everywhere on the internet, doesn't listen to its users and is generally evil. This article has a lot more detail on the problems with Facebook.
The four students started something better, what Facebook should have been from the start: a free software project to create a disbursed social network where anyone can host a "pod" or server to be part of the network, where you own your own data and where there is no advertising or profit motive behind it all. This article explains more, as does the Wikipedia article. As of January 2012 Diaspora is still in "alpha" development phase, but it works pretty well at this point and is worth supporting as a project.
Flight 8's Diaspora account can be viewed without being a Diaspora member, having an account or without signing in. Of course you can join Diaspora on any pod you like and participate there as well. In the meantime the Flight 8 page will carry meeting announcements, photos and other information.
Both the Twitter and Diaspora pages are linked from the main navigation menus on the Flight 8 website, so they are easy to find.
Will there be more social media forays for Flight 8? That depends on how these ones work out! You will have to stay tuned to find out!
4 comments:
- Adam Hunt said...
For anyone interested in signing up for Diaspora these two pods are currently recommended as they have good uptime performance and accept instant registrations (some other pods require an invitation). The fist is the one I use, the second is the new Canadian pod:
*diasp0ra.ca - January 28, 2012 at 7:53 AM
- Adam Hunt said...
Diaspora users should be aware that there is a bug right now with the Diaspora software and as a result photos are not visible cross-pod. Meaning that if I post a photo at www.joindiaspora.com/u/copaflight8 that users on joindiaspora will see the photo, but users on other pods will see just the text.
You can always use that direct link to see the photos for now and your own account to comment.
It is alpha software still, so this sort of thing is expected. Hopefully it will be fixed soon! - February 1, 2012 at 8:16 AM
- Adam Hunt said...
Recently the Flight 8 page on JoinDiaspora.org (JD) has only been visible to signed in users, but this seems to have now been fixed as of today and public posts on the page are visible to anyone on the internet.
This was why I located the Flight 8 account on JD in the first place as not all diaspora pods allow public posts to be seen by signed out users. This is a real boon to club and organizational accounts as we are trying to get the maximum exposure and not just be seen by other Diaspora users! - February 22, 2012 at 8:41 AM
- Adam Hunt said...
It looks like cross-pod photos are now visible! Diaspora seems to be getting better every day!
- February 23, 2012 at 6:53 PM


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US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) believes the Senate has enough votes to pass the Free Flow of Information Act, creating a federal "shield law" for the first time. The bill was ostensibly written to address the Justice Department's unprecedented acquisition of Associated Press phone records, as well as several other high-profile cases where journalists might be forced to reveal their sources to the national security state, and prevent such events from occurring in the future.
As with many so-called "progressive" reforms, however, there's a catch. Well, more than one.
The first catch is an amendment to the bill, insisted upon by California senator Dianne Feinstein, taking it upon itself to define, down to the molecular level, what a "journalist" is. According to this amendment, a "covered journalist" – the sole target of this bill – is an individual "who is, or on the relevant date, was, an employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity or service that disseminates news or information […] with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national or international events or other matters of public interest."
In other words, unless you get paid, you don't get to call yourself a journalist. First blood: Bloggers.
But what if the reporter in question doesn't work for a newspaper, television station, radio station or wire service? What if they got a job at Wikileaks?
"The term 'covered journalist' does not include any person or entity whose principal function, as demonstrated by the totality of such person or entity's work, is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization."
So that means that independent investigative journalists who run their own sites and leak sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome aren't covered. See also: Targets of state-level "Ag-Gag" laws, which criminalize the filming of factory farm conditions and other agricultural atrocities, and people who film the police.
In fact, the Free Flow of Information Act spends more time detailing what it will not cover than describing who it will protect. Luckily, it isn't hard to see who ends up in the clear with this media shield bill: NPR. The Washington Post. The New York Times. CBS. NBC News. CNN. News organizations that already defer to power and cooperate with the state.
This is the same media landscape that promotes the gatekeeper myth, keeps the "view from nowhere" on life support and props up barriers to entry to the industry for all but the most economically privileged. This shield bill will only serve to strengthen the existing journalism cartel and will decimate the "uncovered," free journalism world.
Trevor Hultner is an independent journalist, retail salesperson and Internet content creator. When not writing commentary for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org), he is the host and producer of Smash Walls Radio (@smashwalls), and is working on a new project about the economics of everyday life.


text:
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Intentions of the Heart by Tom Chapman
The intentions of the heart
Are a mystery at best,
They are hidden deep within
Where often is no rest.
They surface for a little while
For better or for worse,
Sometimes they make you happy
Sometimes they make you curse.
They belong to only you
And only you can know for sure,
If your feelings are for real
Or are they premature?
Really there is only One
Who knows your hopes and fear,
And what others will never know
The intentions you hold dear.
A wise man should consider
The intentions deep within,
A place where truth meets honesty
A place that also sins.
Deep within our soul
Somewhere in our mind,
A place like no other
A place that's hard to find.
But only you and God do know
What you really do believe,
The intentions of your heart you see
Are easy to deceive.
God says He judges a man
By the intentions of his heart,
So walk humbly before The Lord
And never to depart.
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text:
I've long thought that the concept of "library" isn't a very coherent one. The small town (pop. 300 or so) public library that serves my grandmother and the very large research library I work in are both called libraries, and yet their staff, collections, and mission couldn't be more different. There are also often large differences in outlook even among academic librarians. Sometimes this is a teaching versus research difference, and sometimes a service versus collections difference. Few librarians seem to move completely to one side or another, and I certainly don't, but the tensions are undoubtedly there in the profession, and often in the same library.
I'm thinking about this because of the juxtaposition of topics I've encountered so far today. This morning I attended a presentation by Bernard Reilly, President of the Center for Research Libraries. He discussed a lot of the initiatives currently underway at CRL, including a number of their digitization projects. One of them involves Latin American newspapers, and as part of an effort to make the materials more useful to the libraries in the region digital copies will be made available to those libraries as well as to CRL libraries, though not freely on the Internet. My favorite quote was that this project is "built on the assumption that an Internet cafe is not a library." Though the CRL hopes to digitize a lot of material in the coming years, I seriously doubt that everything they have will ever be digitized. I wasn't aware until today of how much of it isn't even cataloged yet.
To the undigitized, and possibly never digitized collections of CRL, add the archives scattered across the globe. Then the book collections that aren't now, and may never be digitized. That's a lot of material that will never be freely available from an Internet cafe or your laptop, or even your university should they have the money to pay for such things.
Now let us turn to a blog post at ACRLog I read just after the presentation–Library as Place–For Air Conditioning Books. In it Steven Bell comments on a presentation by Adrian Sannier, Chief Technology Officer at Arizona State University. Bell excerpts a couple of tasty quotes. Here's part of one:
If you were starting [an educational institution] today, how many books would you have? I know what I would do. I'd have none. I'd have zero. Well that would change my cost picture relevant to you and that would make my university's knowledge so much more accessible to you both when you're there and when you weren't there. That kind of reinvention is what we're talking about.
About that, I'm not sure what to say, except it wouldn't be much of an educational institution, but more on that later.
Here's part of another juicy one:
Burn down the library. C'mon, all the books in the world are already digitized….Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already. None of us has the Alexandria Library. Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Indiana. Those guys have digitized their collections. What have you got that they haven't got? Why are you buying a new book? Buy digitial….How many people are using the indicies we're all paying so much for….
Bell certainly realizes how ignorant (or perhaps deliberately provocative) Sannier is about book digitization and higher education, though he opines that maybe some IT people have it in for us librarians. Bell's response is that If "academic libraries are being dismissed as one big book air conditioner then we better start doing some of our own transforming to make sure our operations are lean yet productive, and that we have the data to prove to the top administrators that our libraries deliver the best service for the tuition dollar. It must be shown that academic libraries directly contribute to students achieving learning outcomes and persistence to graduation." That's certainly a sensible approach, but there are other considerations to make about Sannier's poorly informed presentation.
First of all, I find it difficult to take even remotely seriously. Dr. Sannier is no doubt a bright and competent man. He has a PhD in computer science, and before going to ASU worked with computer systems both in academia and private industry, according to his bio. My assertion isn't that I don't take him seriously as a professional, only that I can't take him seriously as an expert on university research or teaching more broadly, that is, outside of the technological and digital portions of it. Obviously Google has not digitized all the books in the Google Book project libraries, and just as obviously the copyrighted ones they have digitized are not freely available online. Obviously also, as Bell note, curricula differ widely among educational institutions, and it's not at all clear that even the complete collections available freely online at some of these libraries would satisfy all comers, which of course we know isn't going to happen anyway.
I'd like to watch the entire presentation, but unfortunately right now I have a spreadsheet of 38,000 nondigitized book titles I have to go through line by line to make location decisions, plus I'm going on vacation next week, so I can barely break away to blog. Perhaps next time I have a free moment, which at this point will probably be New Year's Day. Still, based on the excerpts as well as Bell's reaction, neither of them are necessarily taking into account the larger mission of the research library. Bell's response is to recommend that libraries make the case that tuition dollars are used wisely and student learning outcomes are met and they graduate. That's all good stuff, and I think natural from a public services AUL at an urban state university.
But teaching students is but one mission of a research university, and not necessarily the most important one, if we judge by what professors get the most rewards for. The purpose of a research university is to research, to create knowledge, to contribute to the scholarly record, etc. This differs by field, naturally. In the sciences, engineering, computer science, and other areas, this may not require anything that can't be accessed by a computer. In the humanities, area studies, and some of the social sciences, it does, and it most likely will for decades to come, if not forever. Yes, it's possible that eventually every archive and book collection in the world will be digitized and available to researchers, even if not for free, like some of the collections coming out of the CRL are now available to research libraries. It's possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
Another possibility is that enough material will be digitized that future researchers will just be content with what is digitally available and not worry about the rest. That's pretty sloppy research, but as we know everyone, scholars included, prefer the good but easily available to the best but difficult to obtain. This could happen, but it wouldn't negate the ideal of the research university or research library; it would just cheapen it.
It's this perspective that makes it difficult for research libraries. Sannier rightly notes that no library is a universal library. No one has everything. That's been the case for decades, though. The CRL, for example, was founded in 1949 to address this issue. That's why we have cooperative agreements with other libraries. This is not even remotely a new issue. It might seem like a new issue now only if you think everything is digitized. Since most books, archives, etc., aren't digitized, there's nothing new being said about the issue. Just claiming it's true doesn't make it so.
I don't think every institution of higher education should be a research university or every library a research library. I also don't think that large libraries are necessary for most undergraduate education. It's clear some fields hardly need library resources. Despite its dependence on monographs, a strong liberal arts education could probably be supported by a library of 10,000 books or so, if they were, for example, the 10,000 or so that Peter Briscoe in Reading the Map of Knowledge considers the "core." And perhaps all those books would be digitally available to a new college today, or at least relatively soon. So, if we're talking about starting up a new community college, or business school, or liberal arts college, this get-rid-of-the-print-books approach has at least a chance of working, though what liberal arts college would feel satisfied with a library so small I don't know. Thomas Aquinas College, perhaps. But still, if one wanted to trim the collection to the absolute minimum necessary for a decent liberal arts college, it just might be barely possible. (That's a lot of qualification, I know).
However, once we turn away from undergraduate education, the whole notion breaks down completely, and for any research university worth the name such a scheme is unthinkable if the library is actually designed to support any research. And the argument that no library is universal only goes so far. No library is a universal library, but it seems clear to me that the top 25 libraries or so plus places like CRL together constitute about as universal library as we are about to get. We can measure "top" anyway we please, whether it's the number of items, amount of digital content, or financial resources. Regardless, there have to be a number of libraries that do their best to build just-in-case research collections for some fields so that we can all satisfy our otherwise insatiable just-in-time research needs.
A "research library" without print materials and climate control to protect them is an oxymoron. That might not always be the case, and I wouldn't feel at all bad if the situation went away, but it's here to stay for a long time to come. Print materials are still needed for research, and the purpose of a research library is to support research. I suppose some would consider me an excessive technophobe or bibliophile for saying that, but such is far from the case. I just want to protect research libraries and the universities they support from the excessive technophiles and bibliophobes that could destroy them if given a chance.


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"Jesus Christ: Our Savior and Redeemer," Ensign, Nov. 1983, 6
Jesus Christ: Our Savior and Redeemer
As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we need to place unreserved confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we accept as the Son of God. Until the world accepts Him as the Savior of mankind, lives His teachings, and looks to Him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life in all phases of our lives, we shall continue in our anxiety about the future and our ability to cope with the challenges that mortality brings to each of us.
The fundamental principle of our religion is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Why is it expedient that we center our confidence, our hope, and our trust in one solitary figure? Why is faith in Him so necessary to peace of mind in this life and hope in the world to come?
Our answers to these questions determine whether we face the future with courage, hope, and optimism or with apprehension, anxiety, and pessimism.
My message and testimony is this: Only Jesus Christ is uniquely qualified to provide that hope, that confidence, and that strength to overcome the world and rise above our human failings. To do that, we must place our faith in Him and live by His laws and teachings.
Why faith in Jesus Christ?
Jesus Christ was and is the Lord God Omnipotent. (See Mosiah 3:5.) He was chosen before He was born. He was the all-powerful Creator of the heavens and the earth. He is the source of life and light to all things.
His word is the law by which all things are governed in the universe. All things created and made by Him are subject to His infinite power.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
He came to this earth at a foreappointed time through a royal birthright that preserved His godhood. Combined in His nature were the human attributes of His mortal mother and the divine attributes and powers of His Eternal Father.
His unique heredity made Him heir to the honored title—The Only Begotten Son of God in the flesh. As the Son of God, He inherited powers and intelligence which no human ever had before or since. He was literally Immanuel, which means "God with us." (See Matt. 1:23.)
Even though He was God's Son sent to earth, the divine plan of the Father required that Jesus be subjected to all the difficulties and tribulations of mortality. Thus He became subject to "temptations, … hunger, thirst, and fatigue." (Mosiah 3:7.)
To qualify as the Redeemer of all our Father's children, Jesus had to be perfectly obedient to all the laws of God. Because He subjected Himself to the will of the Father, He grew "from grace to grace, until he received a fulness" of the Father's power. Thus He had "all power, both in heaven and on earth." (D&C 93:13, 17.)
Once this truth about the One we worship as the Son of God is understood, we can more readily comprehend how He had power to heal the sick, cure all manner of diseases, raise the dead, and command the elements. Even devils, whom He cast out, were subject to Him and acknowledged His divinity.
As the great Lawgiver, He gave laws and commandments for the benefit of all our Heavenly Father's children. Indeed, His law fulfilled all previous covenants with the house of Israel. Said He:
"Behold, I am the law, and the light. Look unto me, and endure to the end, and ye shall live; for unto him that endureth to the end will I give eternal life." (3 Ne. 15:9.)
His law required all mankind, regardless of station in life, to repent and be baptized in His name and receive the Holy Ghost as the sanctifying power to cleanse themselves from sin. Compliance with these laws and ordinances will enable each individual to stand guiltless before Him at the day of judgment. Those who so comply are likened to one who builds his house on a firm foundation so that even "the gates of hell shall not prevail against them." (3 Ne. 11:39.)
Appropriately we praise Him as the Rock of our salvation. (See 2 Ne. 4:30.)
To have any measure of appreciation and gratitude for what He accomplished in our behalf, we must remember these vital truths:
Jesus came to earth to do our Father's will.
He came with a foreknowledge that He would bear the burden of the sins of us all.
He knew that He would be lifted up on the cross.
He was born to be the Savior and Redeemer of all mankind.
He was able to accomplish His mission because He was the Son of God and He possessed the power of God.
He was willing to accomplish His mission because He loves us.
No mortal being had the power or capability to redeem all other mortals from their lost and fallen condition, nor could any other voluntarily forfeit his life and thereby bring to pass a universal resurrection for all other mortals.
Only Jesus Christ was able and willing to accomplish such a redeeming act of love.
We may never understand nor comprehend in mortality how He accomplished what He did, but we must not fail to understand why He did what He did.
Everything He did was prompted by His unselfish, infinite love for us. Hear His own words:
"For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent; …
"Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink." (D&C 19:16, 18.)
As was so characteristic of His entire mortal experience, the Savior submitted to our Father's will and took the bitter cup and drank.
He suffered the pains of all men in Gethsemane so they would not have to suffer if they would repent.
He submitted Himself to humiliation and insults from His enemies without complaint or retaliation.
And, finally, He endured the flogging and brutal shame of the cross. Only then did He voluntarily submit to death. In His words:
"No man taketh it [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father" (John 10:18.)
He is the Resurrection and the Life. (See John 11:25.)
This power to revive His own life was possible because Jesus Christ was God—even the Son of God. Because He had the power to overcome death, all mankind will be resurrected. "Because I live, ye shall live also." (John 14:19.)
How we reverence His name—yes, even the hallowed titles that represent His deeds!
He is our Great Exemplar.
He was perfectly obedient to our Heavenly Father and showed us how to forsake the world and keep our priorities in perspective.
Because of His love for us, He showed us how to rise above petty weaknesses and to demonstrate affection, love, and charity in our relationships with others.
He is the Bread of Life. (See John 6:35.)
By fasting, prayer, and service to others, He showed that "man shall not live by bread alone" (Matt. 4:4) but must be nourished by the word of God.
He was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Heb. 4:15), and so He is able to help them that are tempted (see Heb. 2:18.)
He is the Prince of Peace—the ultimate Comforter. (See Isa. 9:6.)
As such He has power to comfort an anguished heart pierced by sorrow or sin. He provides a special kind of peace that no human agency can provide:
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (John 14:27.)
He is the Good Shepherd. (See John 10:11.)
He possesses all the attributes of the divine nature of God. He is virtuous, patient, kind, long-suffering, gentle, meek, and charitable. If we are weak or deficient in any of these qualities, He stands willing to strengthen and compensate.
He is a Wonderful Counselor. (See Isa. 9:6.)
Indeed there is no human condition—be it suffering, incapacity, inadequacy, mental deficiency, or sin—which He cannot comprehend or for which His love will not reach out to the individual.
He pleads today:
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matt. 11:28.)
He is our Advocate, Mediator, and Judge.
Because He is God, He is perfectly equitable with justice and mercy. He can simultaneously plead our cause and judge our destiny.
Faith in Him is more than mere acknowledgment that He lives. It is more than professing belief.
Faith in Jesus Christ consists of complete reliance on Him. As God, He has infinite power, intelligence, and love. There is no human problem beyond His capacity to solve. Because He descended below all things (see D&C 122:8), He knows how to help us rise above our daily difficulties.
Faith in Him means believing that even though we do not understand all things, He does. We, therefore, must look to Him "in every thought; doubt not, fear not." (D&C 6:36.)
Faith in Him means trusting that He has all power over all men and all nations. There is no evil which He cannot arrest. All things are in His hands. This earth is His rightful dominion. Yet He permits evil so that we can make choices between good and evil.
His gospel is the perfect prescription for all human problems and social ills.
But His gospel is only effective as it is applied in our lives. Therefore, we must "feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do." (2 Ne. 32:3.)
Unless we do His teachings, we do not demonstrate faith in Him.
Think what a different world this would be if all mankind would do as He said: "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. …
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Matt. 22:37, 39.)
What then is the answer to the question "What is to be done?" concerning the problems and dilemmas that individuals, communities, and nations face today? Here is His simple prescription:
"Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.
"… Believe that ye must repent of your sins and forsake them, and humble yourselves before God; and ask in sincerity of heart that he would forgive you; and now, if you believe all these things see that ye do them." (Mosiah 4:9–10; italics added.)
As members of the Church, we are "under obligation to make the sinless Son of Man [our] ideal—the one perfect being who ever walked the earth.
"Sublimest Example of Nobility
"God-like in nature
"Perfect in his love
"Our Redeemer
"Our Savior
"The immaculate Son of our Eternal Father
"The Light, the Life, the Way." (David O. McKay, Improvement Era, June 1951, p. 478.)
With all my soul, I love Him.
I humbly testify that He is the same loving, compassionate Lord today as when He walked the dusty roads of Palestine. He is close to His servants on this earth. He cares about and loves each of us today. Of that you can be assured.
He lives today as our Lord, our Master, our Savior, our Redeemer, and our God.
God bless us all to believe Him, to accept Him, to worship Him, and to fully trust in Him, and to follow Him is my humble prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.


text:
By ALLEN G. BREED and SHARON COHEN
AP National Writers
HOLLY SPRINGS, Miss. (AP) _ Roy DeBerry learned at an early age what could happen to a black boy who violated Mississippi's Jim Crow-era social code.
His teacher at the one-room church school outside town had arranged for porters to toss copies of the Chicago Defender, Jet and other black publications from passing trains, because mailing them was too risky. One day, the young pupils learned the gruesome tale of Emmett Till, the Chicago boy beaten beyond recognition, shot and dumped in a river in 1955 _ for whistling at a white woman.
"There was real terror in Mississippi," says DeBerry, just 8 at the time. "We knew that this state was capable of killing and lynching a 14-year-old boy _ and was also capable of not convicting the people that did it."
As a teen himself, DeBerry knew he was gambling with his own life when he joined civil rights activists who came to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to challenge its way of life.
During what became known as "Freedom Summer," hundreds of volunteers_ mostly Northern white college students and others, including Aviva Futorian, a young history teacher _ descended on the state to focus national attention on the indignities and horrors of segregation. They came to register blacks to vote, and establish "Freedom Schools" and community centers to help prepare those long disenfranchised for participation in what they hoped would be a new political order.
Opposition was widespread and brutal. Churches were bombed, volunteers were harassed, arrested, beaten _ even murdered.
Fifty years later, Freedom Summer stands out as a watershed moment in the long, often bloody drive for civil rights. Mass resistance to integration started to crumble. Congress took a monumental step toward equal rights. And scores of young, idealistic volunteers embarked on long careers of activism that continue to shape American politics and policy today.
And in this vortex of history, lifelong friendships formed between people from vastly different worlds.
So it was that a 16-year-old black factory worker's son from Mississippi and the 26-year-old daughter of a Jewish furniture mogul from Chicago's affluent suburbs bonded over bologna and tomato sandwiches and chatter at Modena's Cafe during a summer that would define their lives.
Sitting side by side recently on a sofa in Futorian's condominium overlooking Chicago's fashionable Lincoln Park, the two friends flipped through albums of photos from 1964. They reminisced about Freedom School lessons under a tree in oppressive heat, practice sessions for a sit-in at a segregated theater, taboos that prevented a white woman and black man from sitting next to each other in a car. As they talked, they sometimes finished each other's stories as old friends often do.
"Everybody told us our lives would be in danger," said Futorian, now a 76-year-old attorney. "I probably didn't have as much trepidation as I should have. Because it's hard to imagine your own death."
Freedom Summer followed many winters of discontent in the fight for civil rights. Years of demonstrations by determined local blacks, boycotts, legislative campaigns and bloody pitched battles had not dislodged segregation.
As the summer of 1964 approached, it was clear that more trouble loomed.
"Maybe we're not going to get many people registered this summer," Bob Moses, the summer project's chief architect, cautioned volunteers during a spring training session at a college in Ohio. "Maybe all we're going to do is live through this summer. In Mississippi, that will be so much!"
Moses, field secretary at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had already endured three years of beatings and police harassment for trying to register blacks in the Klan-infested Mississippi Delta. By 1964, the Harlem native _ now co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations, an umbrella organization for civil rights groups _ had reached a conclusion: "We had to do something, something big, that would really open the situation up. Otherwise, they'd simply continue to kill the best among us."
The murder in January of Louis Allen, a black logger who'd volunteered to register to vote in Amite County, was a turning point. On March 20, SNCC announced the "Mississippi Summer Project."
Putting Northern whites in harm's way was an essential element.
"If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children," John Lewis, a coordinator for SNCC then and now a longtime Georgia congressman, wrote in his memoir, "Walking With the Wind."
As volunteers converged for training at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, (now part of Miami University) Moses told them they should not go south "to save the Mississippi Negro," but only "if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one."
On June 21, even before orientation ended, chilling word spread: Three young volunteers _ New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and Mississippi native James Chaney _ had vanished while investigating the burning of a black church near the railroad town of Philadelphia. Futorian recalls Schwerner's wife, Rita, taking the stage in Ohio to declare that she believed they were dead.
Many confronted real terror for the first time, recalled another volunteer, Marshall Ganz, who would become a Harvard professor: "The question was: Could you find enough courage to go, despite your fear?"
Futorian forged ahead. Her parents were supportive, but anxious. When her father _ who owned factories in Mississippi _ offered to hire a bodyguard for her, she scoffed.
"Can you imagine what that would look like?" she asked him.
But en route to Mississippi, the menace quickly became clear. Following a gasoline stop in Tennessee, Futorian's light-blue Chevy Corvair and its mixed-race passengers were chased for miles at high speeds until their pursuers gave up. Exhausted and scared, the volunteers arrived around 3 a.m. at the county square in Bolivar, Tenn., and slept in the Corvair, parking among other cars, hoping that would provide some security.
On another occasion, this time in northern Mississippi, she and SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael _ who'd later trade nonviolence for militancy and popularize the phrase "Black Power _ picked up a tail.
Carmichael taught her a handy driving tip _ how to "pop" a clutch for a quick getaway. He offered some advice, too:
"Keep in mind," he said, "the escapee wants to escape much more strongly than the chaser wants to catch."
Maybe it was because his grandparents had been landowners since just after slavery days, or because his father wasn't dependent on sharecropping a white man's land. Whatever the source, Roy DeBerry had "an independent streak."
He sensed the injustice of having to climb to the gallery at the segregated Holly Theatre on the courthouse square. He resented having to call the white kid behind the counter at Tyson's Drug Store "sir."
"No one needed to teach you that," the 66-year-old DeBerry said during a recent visit to Holly Springs. "It was just something that was in your DNA."
So when a Freedom School opened in an unassuming white-frame building across from historically black Rust College, DeBerry soon found his way there.
When Futorian _ then a teacher at two such schools _ met with a group of black teenage boys, she peppered them with questions: Who are the richest blacks in town? How do they earn their living? Are they involved in the civil rights movement? If not, why not?
"Roy was the only one who knew the answers," she recalls with a smile.
DeBerry, nicknamed "Shorty" by his classmates, liked how Futorian "took my views seriously, even though I was a very young person." It was his first interaction with a white person "on a social level."
Through donated books, Futorian introduced him to James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and other "subversive" black authors.
As comfortable as they were together, sharing sandwiches at Modena's in the "colored" section of town, organizers felt it was too dangerous for a young black man and a white woman to canvass for voters. DeBerry joined Michael Clurman, a volunteer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knocking on doors to encourage people to register. They didn't make much progress.
The tensions in Holly Springs were detailed by SNCC organizer Larry Rubin in an article for a student magazine back at Antioch College in Ohio. He wrote of curses, of a beer bottle hurled at his head, and he described the "Freedom Worker's Walk, which you acquire when fear sinks into you so deep it becomes natural. You walk slouched and slow along the buildings side of the pavement farthest from the street. You register no expression and face straight ahead while your eyes shift from side to side to see who's following."
Still, Rubin knew his race afforded him protections not available to black residents.
"What courage it takes to attempt to register!" wrote Rubin, who became a union official. "Your name is printed in the local paper. You can probably count on being fired or losing your sharecrop. Many who attempted to register have been beaten, or have had their house burned. Some have been killed."
A suspicious Aug. 1 automobile wreck that killed Wayne Yancey, a 21-year-old black volunteer from Chicago, rattled Rubin and others in Holly Springs.
Three days later, searchers dug the bodies of the civil rights workers who had disappeared in June _ Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner _ from an earthen dam. They'd been beaten and shot at close range.
Freedom Summer was lurching toward a bitter close.
By fall, most of the Northern volunteers had returned home. Aviva Futorian remained.
She worked as a field organizer for SNCC and held a weekly college preparatory study group for a few particularly promising students, including DeBerry.
A black farmer offered his dining room as a meeting space. DeBerry joined Futorian after his regular classes for the short ride. They were always careful to do what DeBerry calls "the `Driving Miss Daisy' thing." He'd be at the wheel, she'd be in the back, or vice versa.
"We didn't know where the Klan were hanging out," DeBerry recalled recently as he rolled along Highway 4, retracing the familiar route. On one occasion, he felt the need for some protection.
Stopping at the home of an NAACP activist, DeBerry asked Futorian to wait while he went inside. A few minutes later, he emerged and placed something in the trunk of her Corvair: It was a shotgun.
Futorian returned to Chicago after a year and a half. Believing her color limited her abilities as a civil rights organizer, she decided to pursue justice another way. "I thought maybe I could be some kind of catalyst, and lawyers seemed to be good catalysts," she says.
With her help, DeBerry was accepted at her alma mater, Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He helped found a black student association there, and led a sit-in to push for a black studies department and more minority faculty members.
Others' lives, too, were transformed by that summer:
Ganz, now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, spent 16 years as an organizer for the United Farm Workers. Mario Savio, another volunteer, became a fiery student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley. Barney Frank served more than 30 years as a representative from Massachusetts in the U.S. House.
Changes also came to Mississippi.
Widespread resistance to integration began fading, and businesses grudgingly complied with the Civil Rights Act signed that summer, says John Dittmer, a professor emeritus at DePauw University and author of "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi."
"You still had violence, no question about that," he says. "But it wasn't that systematic use of terror that had intimidated people for so long. That was gone."
Carmichael, the SNCC leader who later took the name Kwame Ture, called Freedom Summer "a turning point for a whole generation of us. It was certainly the boldest, most dramatic, and traumatic single event of the entire movement."
Political progress, though, was limited.
At the national convention that summer, the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tried to be seated as the official delegation, arguing the all-white Mississippi Democrats had been elected from districts where blacks couldn't vote. President Lyndon Johnson, fearing a revolt from Southern states, engineered a compromise that would give the Freedom Democrats two at-large seats but no power to vote. The group rejected the offer.
But in televised hearings, the nation heard Freedom Party delegate Fannie Lou Hamer's passionate call for inclusion. Speaking before the credentials committee, she described being jailed for trying to register to vote, and police forcing other black inmates to repeatedly beat her with a blackjack.
"Is this America," she asked, "the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?"
And though fewer than one-tenth of the 17,000 black residents who attempted to register that summer succeeded, the effort helped create momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some believe this activism planted the seeds for history-making events generations later. "If it hadn't been for the veterans of Freedom Summer," John Lewis wrote, "there would be no Barack Obama."
But Rita Bender, Michael Schwerner's widow, is far less optimistic.
She says a refusal by some to recognize past inequities is partly to blame for today's social ills. Now an attorney in Seattle, she's dismayed at recent developments _ a Supreme Court decision that nullified portions of the Voting Rights Act, numerous voter identification laws, the proliferation of so-called stand-your-ground laws. The country, she says, is "moving backward."
"There's an old song that says freedom is a constant struggle," she says. "That sounds corny as I say it. But, I mean, the reality is nations, people evolve. And they either evolve for the better, or they stagnate … If you don't address inequities, then they fester."
Back on that comfortable sofa in Chicago, Futorian and DeBerry chat about that sweltering season 50 years ago _ and the legacy they share.
"I think it was a defining moment for the state, for the South, for the country," DeBerry says.
"It really sort of made a crack in the dike," adds Futorian. "And then this flood came rushing through. So much happened over the next years. But … it started there."
If not for Freedom Summer, DeBerry says he probably would have left Mississippi permanently. Instead, he returned and held a variety of administrative positions in higher education and government.
At one point, as Hinds County executive, he found himself in a strange position. Byron De La Beckwith, the man who assassinated NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in 1963, was being held in the county jail and was receiving fan mail. DeBerry determined how many stamps he'd receive for replies: one a week.
And Mississippi led Futorian to a legal career, focusing in recent decades on death row inmates and a successful campaign to abolish capital punishment in Illinois. She's now advocating for prison reform.
Following a 1995 SNCC reunion in Holly Springs, the former teacher and student began collecting the oral histories of those who'd lived under Jim Crow in Mississippi's Benton and Marshall counties. In 2004, they formally launched the Hill Country Project, which has since grown to include education support and economic development.
Through all the change over the last five decades, there has been one constant for DeBerry and Futorian _ their friendship.
It is, says DeBerry, "just as real, is just as interesting, is just as enriching and is just as powerful and sweet as it was in 1964."


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Sometimes our layout file can get cluttered with various flash messages. Each message takes three lines of code as we want to check that each message isn't nil before trying to display it within a paragraph tag.

ASCIIcasts
 <% unless flash[:notice].nil? %>
<%= flash[:notice] %>
 <% end %> <% unless flash[:notice].nil? %>
<%= flash[:notice] %>
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flash messages in the layout file.
There is an easier way to do this which is to loop through the flash, and display each flash message that way. The code looks like this:
<% flash.each do |key,msg| %> <%= content_tag :p, msg, :id => key %> <% end %>
content_tag takes three parameters: the first is the name of the element, the second is the content that appears between the element's start and end tags, and the third is a hash of options that become the element's attributes. The code above is much shorter than the original and has the added advantage that any other flash messages we set will automatically be displayed.


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The City of Concord's Information Technology Department is a broad blend of technical skills. We have been expressly tailored to meet the wide range of technology and requests that supporting our diverse city services demand. We strive to perform support of all departments and their related needs to deliver prompt and courteous services to the Citizens of Concord.
Our core mission is to provide leadership and deliver business value, by providing innovative, cost-effective solutions that are defined by the City of Concord's services.
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Abel Ferrara
Review by Glenn Heath Jr.
Posted on 01 October 2012
Source Polygram VHS
Categories 31 Days of Horror IX
It's all theory and philosophy until someone gets bit. Abel Ferrara's art/vampire film The Addiction, a dense and moody examination of fear and self-loathing in 1990s New York City, takes this credo to insane heights. In the beginning, words and ideas are modes of deflection used by characters living in an academic world where hypothetical thought rules. But their wake-up call sleeks through the night, appearing suddenly and without reproach, brutally executing a primal reckoning of faith. From here, a new language emerges written in jet-black blood, caked on the lips of sirens and streaming down the contours of swan-like necks. Here, the crisp texture of film and photographic images is crucial for Ferrara. He sees the jarringly blunt stylization of death and trauma as the only way to reveal highbrow banter as dangerous contradiction, doing so within a genre primed for social critique. But is the horror film itself part of the problem? It all starts simply enough with a nighttime stroll and a sudden proposition of fate.
"Tell me to leave you alone," demands a stunningly calm vampire seductress to a shocked grad student in a dank New York City alley crisscrossed by sharp, bleeding shadows. What a dare! These haunting words are uttered before each brazen attack in The Addiction. It's as if the various supernatural beings walking the dark streets must defy their prey to stand up for survival before jumping on a single bit of hesitation to justify the impending blood lust. But looking evil in the eye and failing to react is just one of the many philosophical and moral conundrums recycling throughout Ferrara's black and white masterpiece about dependency, fear, and political outrage. In fact, there are so many competing ideological threads in The Addiction that the very act of verbal expression becomes a form of sadism.
Kathleen Conklin, the aforementioned tough-minded grad student played by Lili Taylor who gets attacked by a sleek vampire named Casanova in the opening moments of Ferrara's film, initially defines her professional and personal life by historical revisionism. War crimes are her object of study, and she spends the film's first moment studying graphic pictures documenting the Mai Lai Massacre. Kathleen views these images with cold detachment, listening intently to the droll voiceover of a lecturer: "The conscience of an outraged society was temporarily satisfied," he dramatically muses, referencing the American public's faux-appeasement after obtaining national justice against the guilty soldiers. But college life is just a façade, and Ferrara has big thematic plans for Kathleen. After being attacked, the deep bite marks on her neck and the blood streaming down her face, often framed within smooth, nearly slow motion dolly shots, begin a slow transition from theoretical dependency to literal acts of horror and extreme physical addiction.
Unlike most horror films, The Addiction sees transformation as an ideological process rather than a physical one. Kathleen's transition from nebbish bohemian waif to ruthlessly efficient vampire takes up most of the film's first hour. It's like watching a drastic and riveting shift in perspective transcribed through art film aesthetics (temporal gaps, extreme close-ups). Her entire vision of the world morphs during these wonderfully stylized sequences as Ferrara plays with cinematic space in fascinating ways. His camera glides like a bat, lingering for long passages on Kathleen's white face blotted with droplets of blood. She tries to resist the urge to kill the innocent, even taking blood from a homeless man with a syringe during the early moments of her addiction. But that's just the last fragment of her previous identity dying away. Then, it happens. She's no longer afraid of the drug dealers populating the streets, or weary of her arrogant professor's criticisms. Instead, Kathleen confronts them by manipulating their weaknesses, making each a permanent addition to her freshly minted way of life.
Only her obsessions turn injurious. Kathleen's initial rush for blood is soon replaced by a crippling dependency on the power she wields over her victims. Horrific images of Nazi concentration camps, piles of bodies, and Hitler's voice invade her dreams, which now have become full-fledged nightmares. Ferrara is a master of allegorical interruption, clogging what most filmmakers would constitute as dramatic scenes with montages of pictorial death and slow camera moves that evoke deterioration. Kathleen is often consumed during these intense moments of self-doubt, much like the setting sun, which doesn't just descend in The Addiction; a thick wall of clouds swallows it up. "I'm rotting inside, but I'm not dying." Despite her power, Kathleen now faces a new kind of contradiction, one defined by ideological frustration and panic, something that is directly referenced in her wonderfully strange scenes with Christopher Walken's ghostly mentor, Peina.
Ultimately, The Addiction isn't interested in genre tropes so much as revealing their inadequacies to express complex characterization and themes. Traditional vampire movie clichés (fear of sun, mirrors) don't define Kathleen and those of her ilk; they're simply annoyances that can be skirted around with some skill and patience. The real fatal flaw for Kathleen is realizing that despite her strength and ideological prowess, traits that come to a head during the amazingly audacious dinner party massacre late in the film, she's really just as helpless as the crack addict on the nearest corner. Or perhaps just as guilty as those who've committed atrocities in the name of foreign policy and spiritual righteousness. "Self revelation is annihilation of self." Kathleen's final words sound like the confession of philosopher devoured by their own ideology, yet someone who has finally realized that habitual patterns of all kinds are equally debilitating. Arrogance, heroin, lust, and fear: they're all spiked with the same flavor of poison.
The Addiction
1995Psycho III
1986Wake in Fright
1972Big Foot
2010Invasion from Inner Earth
1974In the Company of Men
1997Happy Birthday to Me
1981I Drink Your Blood
1970The Legend of Boggy Creek
1972Maximum Overdrive
1986The Giant Spider Invasion
1975Ganja & Hess
1973Not of This Earth
1957Let's Scare Jessica to Death
1971Next of Kin
1982Def by Temptation
1990Shriek of the Mutilated
1974The Manster
1959The Alpha Incident
1978The Bride
1985Planet of the Vampires
1965The Hole
2009Vampire in Brooklyn
1995Sasquatch: the Legend of Bigfoot
1977Mad Love
1935The Demons of Ludlow
1989The Blair Witch Project
1999We don't do comments anymore, but you may contact us here or find us on Twitter or Facebook.


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Does Boston Have a Grudge Against Fun?
Reading the Herald this spring, you'd think the city was one bonnet away from a Puritan-like takedown of dancing. The paper ran five separate stories in March and May reporting that unwitting Boston nightclubs were getting busted for allowing people to boogie.
According to the tabloid, the House of Blues was cited when revelers at a February 21 Flogging Molly concert risked injury by moshing (a punk dance heavy on shoving and flying elbows). Following a hearing on the incident, the paper reported, the club was ordered to put up illuminated signs that read, "No Moshing." Another story said that the Cure Lounge in the Theater District had been issued similar citations.
Outrage followed, including calls to arms against Mayor Menino by members of the city's youth culture. A furious oldster even penned a letter to the editor waxing nostalgic about the time regulators tried to outlaw stage-diving at the now-closed Channel…and a riot ensued. Then anger turned to paranoia, with rumors of a secret anti-dance police detail. Was this all-out war?
House of Blues operating partner Declan Mehigan says the city's unbelievably draconian anti-moshing stance was, in fact, not believable. Police did issue a citation—but not for reckless dancing—and the club volunteered to put up more signs, just in case. Those signs read, "CAUTION! Moshing, crowd surfing, head walking and stage diving leads to injury to yourself and other patrons. For your safety and of those around you, please DO NOT engage in these activities." No big deal, really—similar warnings have hung in the hall's entrance since it opened in 2009.
At City Hall, Patricia Malone, director of Consumer Affairs and Licensing, says gyrating isn't the issue—it's rule-breaking. "I'm a regulator," she says. "If you're not in compliance, then you may be written up."
Though Cure Lounge owner Felix Paige says he thought he had a dancing license "just like everyone else," Malone says the club didn't apply for one until its third citation. (Boston's entertainment-license application asks club owners to check a box if they want dancing in their venue. No checked box, no dancing.)
As for the House of Blues incident, Flogging Molly returned there for a show in late June. Mehigan says the crowd moshed while police stood by, just like the last time. No citations were issued. Maybe the moshing wasn't as raucous. Or maybe the cops left their bonnets back at the station.
— David Riedel


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In the late 1920s it was becoming apparent that a new assembly hall was desperately needed as the main building was becoming inadequate. The main building was getting too small, floors needed replacing, and heating and plumbing systems needed serious updating.
In 1930 the Board of Trustees authorized the erection of a new building. It was initially planned to be an addition to the rear of the main building, but it was decided that a separate hall would be more practical.
The new building was speedily built and it was ready for use by November of 1930. The building is named for Trustee Congressman Louis Adams Frothingham. He was the chairman of the funds drive for the new building. Sadly, he passed away in 1928, before the buildings completion.